Description

2015 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection

They have stalked the horizons of our culture, wreaked havoc on moribund concepts of dead and not dead, threatened our sense of identity, and endangered our personal safety. Now zombies have emerged from the lurking shadows of society’s fringes to wander the sacred halls of the academy, feasting on tender minds and hurling rot across our intellectual landscape. It is time to unite in common cause, to shore up defenses, firm up critical and analytical resources, and fortify crumbling lines of inquiry. Responding to this call, Brain Workers from the Zombie Research Center poke and prod the rotting corpus of zombie culture trying to make sense of cult classics and the unstoppable growth of new and even more disturbing work. They exhume "zombie theory" and decaying historical documents from America, Europe, and the Caribbean in order to unearth the zombie world and arm readers with the brain tools necessary for everyday survival. Readers will see that zombie culture today "lives" in shapes as mutable as a zombie horde—and is often just as violent.

Author Bio

Edward P. Comentale is Professor of English at Indiana University. He is editor (with Stephen Watt and Skip Willman) of Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007 (IUP, 2005) and author of Sweet Air: Modernism, Regionalism, and American Popular Song.

Aaron Jaffe is Professor of English at the University of Louisville. He is editor (with Edward P. Comentale) of The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies (IUP, 2009) and author of Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity.

Reviews

“Brain Workers from the Zombie Research Center poke and prod the rotting corpus of zombie culture trying to make sense of cult classics and the unstoppable growth of new and even more disturbing work.”

“Provides a study of zombies in popular literature, it also becomes a kind of critique of zombie scholarship itself, and by extension, a critique of humanities scholarship more generally.”
— Journal of Modern Literature

“There are so many great things to discuss about this awesome science fiction/horror genre, and the The Year's Work team of Commentate and Jaffe tackle it admirably. There are a number of home runs in this collection. ”
— boing boing

“An intelligent and highly engaging collection that will appeal to legions of zombie fans, to students in the humanities, and to scholars working in fields that have already been affected by or are now preparing for the zombie apocalypse. It blends entertaining, illuminating, and accessible readings of zombies and zombie culture with unique interventions made from authoritative positions of expertise.”
— Julian Murphet, author of Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde